Chris Lehane says he wakes up worried “at 3 a.m. literally every night.”
Lehane is OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs. He’s in charge of policy issues for the artificial intelligence firm that’s made outreach to Washington, D.C., central to its strategy for winning the next millennium. And, needless to say, he has a lot on his mind.
So what’s rousing Lehane from slumber? This is what he told us during a morning sitdown last week:
The second thing keeping Lehane awake? The geopolitics, especially whether the United States or China will become the undisputed leader in AI.
Making the case that AI can benefit wide swaths of the country while helping the United States outcompete China is this old political hand’s central message for a city that looks little like it did when he left government service more than a couple of decades ago.
From Washington to the Valley. Lehane was a hard-charging aide in the Clinton White House who has brought his aggressive style to the private sector. In recent years, he’s worked out West and became a key tech executive at Airbnb and a crypto investment firm.
Intensified by his wiry frame and tendency to pose rhetorical questions, Lehane’s manner is excitable, expansive, bordering on evangelistic.
Over coffee, he said his desire to help as many Americans as possible — by getting them to use AI products — came from the lessons he learned in the executive branch.
“The most important thing in politics is, do you get up every day and actually worry about and think about how you’re going to help move the middle class forward,” Lehane says.
Lehane said getting ChatGPT and other algorithms into Americans’ hands isn’t just a moral or economic issue. He described it as the key to mitigating the type of political backlash that has enveloped many Big Tech companies in recent years.
After all, people are hearing about (and sometimes even seeing firsthand) job losses, deteriorating mental health, bots getting far too chummy with kids and even potentially the softening of our species’ cognitive powers.
Dealing with these issues, and whatever backlash they prompt, means the AI industry has “to really put these tools in people’s hands right now,” Lehane said. That way, they can experience the benefits early and often, he argued.
Still, Lehane says it’s important to “really be straight up” about “cohorts that potentially get displaced.” In other words, people will lose their jobs (though fewer than will gain them, in his accounting).
Build, baby, build: Bringing AI to the masses brings Lehane back to a theme he’s hammering in Washington: the need for infrastructure, like the $500 billion Stargate project OpenAI and its partners are already constructing in Texas.
“When it comes to building out infrastructure, it is really the… amount of time it actually takes to get approvals to be able to go build,” Lehane says.
Permitting is the key issue, he said, because billions in capital is staying on the sidelines when investors lack clarity about when their returns will be coming in.
Beating China. Lehane hints OpenAI will soon have an answer to China’s DeepSeek, the open-weights model that, earlier this year, shook confidence that the world will build its AI on U.S. systems.
“How many countries in the world can we make sure we’re putting… AI that is informed and infused by democratic values into their hands?” Lehane says.
China competition is an idea AI companies have deployed to argue for going faster, investing more in their projects and regulating them less. After all, both parties worry about Beijing’s intentions.
“AI tends to be an issue that transcends partisan politics,” Lehane said.
Trump’s Washington: The politics around AI puts Lehane and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an interesting spot. The president and his allies prize loyalty above all else.
Altman has clearly gotten that message. While Altman feuded with President Donald Trump’s ally-turned-enemy-turned-whatever Elon Musk earlier this year, he has been supportive of the president’s tech agenda. He also makes sure to pitch the benefit of his company’s projects in a way Trump loves: jobs.
But what about Lehane — the Democratic operative-turned-Silicon Valley politics whisperer? Not your typical profile of a successful Trump-era Washington operator. Lehane leans in on the idea that his company’s goal of making the United States a leader in AI is something everyone in Washington can support.
Lehane’s strategy in the capital, he said, involves being forthright about what’s next and making initial proposals to solve issues of, say, permitting or energy or controversial content. Showing off a bit and using interest in OpenAI to convene policy discussions is part of his Washington plan, too.
“The innovation technology itself, people are incredibly interested and attracted to, so they do come in,” he says.
Ultimately, Lehane seems to have set OpenAI the task of being as important to AI policy as Altman and his crew are to the digital future.
“How do you actually start to think about this?” Lehane said of how the government should oversee AI. “Can you come up with ideas and solutions that are as transformative as the technology?”
